Ok, so I’m sure you’ve heard by now about overclocking and the resulting influx of cooling products to the marketplace.  I had too, but still computed along through Silicon Valley with my stock retail AMD cpu cooler and heatsink combo.

Crysis and some major graphics editing, however, pushed my x2-4200+ clocking @ 2.2 GHz to the 60 degrees Celsius and above marks.  That’s hot, precariously close to way too hot.  At these temperatures Crysis would slow to a crawl with the best examples being the lack of synchronicity between the spoken words of the game’s characters and the actual visual mouthing of the words.  In stark contrast however, the game would run the same cutscenes flawlessly at cooler operating temperatures.

How do I know this?  Enter the Zerotherm BTF-90 Copper heatsink cooler/quiet fan combo.  I traded a nice gentleman off of craigslist an AMD x2 processor for it and am very pleased.  I probably would never have purchased the cooling unit and that’s why I decided to write this article.  I believe it’s important that those who don’t know whether or not actually shelling out money for an aftermarket CPU cooler is worth it, that indeed it is.  My idle temperatures reported by SpeedFan (a wonderful temperature monitoring application, IMHO) average 37 degrees Celsius and 49 degrees Celsius during high computing loads.  This is much better than my average idle temperature of 50 degrees Celsius and 61 degrees Celsius during high CPU usage periods.

One could probably argue with the overclockability options of motherboards today and the ability to push CPUs well beyond their advertised speeds that buying a nice aftermarket cooling unit like the Zerotherm or similar and then overclocking your processor could even be a cost effective speed upgrade.  But even with the potential higher clock speeds and increased reliability and longevity of your processor, I’d have to argue the biggest reason to upgrade from your stock heatsink and fan is in the increased responsiveness of your computer.

While I don’t have statistical proof to validate my claims of increased responsiveness, with my lower operating temperatures I have been noticing fewer hangs and no lock ups as of yet.  All in all, I highly recommend contemplating upgrading your heatsink/fan cooling combo as your next computer upgrade (especially if you had temperatures in the range that I had).

In summary, I’m certainly pleased with trading an x2 that I wasn’t using for saving and improving upon the performance of the x2 I currently use; yet must state that I am most pleased by the new firsthand experience and knowledge I’ve gained regarding the practicality of an aftermarket cooling solution.